All else-valor, a good name, glory, everything in heaven and earth-is secondary to the charm of riches.
Remember you must die whether you sit about moping all day long or whether on feast days you stretch out in a green field, happy with a bottle of Falernian from your innermost cellar.
That destructive siren, sloth, is ever to be avoided.
Whom does undeserved honour please, and undeserved blame alarm, but the base and the liar?
And Tragedy should blush as much to stoop To the low mimic follies of a farce, As a grave matron would to dance with girls.
Glory drags all men along, low as well as high, bound captive at the wheels of her glittering car.
As riches grow, care follows, and a thirst For more and more.
Once sent out, a word takes wings beyond recall.
Drive Nature out with a pitchfork, yet she hurries back, And will burst through your foolish contempt, triumphant.
Of writing well the source and fountainhead is wise thinking.
Virtue consists in fleeing vice.
Not even for an hour can you bear to be alone, nor can you advantageously apply your leisure time, but you endeavor, a fugitive and wanderer, to escape from yourself, now vainly seeking to banish remorse by wine, and now by sleep; but the gloomy companion presses on you, and pursues you as you fly.
Sport begets tumultuous strife and wrath, and wrath begets fierce quarrels and war to the death.
Punishment follows close on crime.
Posterity, thinned by the crime of its ancestors, shall hear of those battles.
Despise pleasure; pleasure bought by pain in injurious.
Let the fictitious sources of pleasure be as near as possible to the true.
A poem is like a painting.
He paints a dolphin in the woods, a boar in the waves.
It makes a great difference whether Davus or a hero speaks.